Supported Studios Crawford Artists in Context

Your Tenement Memories event, Ballyfermot.

Credit: : Dan Butler

through conversations and by handing out flyers. The non-corporate nature of these invitations, where staff were physically going out to people in their own places and spaces, underlined the team members’ personal commitment to the values of the project and in doing so helped to fulfil its aims. People attending the events were invited to share their memories over a cup of tea, both in groups and in one-to-one conversations with social historians and experienced citizen engagement professionals. In this way, the conversations were both comfortable and private where privacy was required.

Detailed preparation and planning, which was essential to the success of the events, included desk research on best oral history practice, together with consulting oral historians and other experts. Attention was paid to ensuring that all paperwork was ethically sound and GDPR compliant and that the informed consent of interviewees was secured and formally recorded. Interview design, which was founded on the principles of respect and empowerment, included planning to provide sufficient explanation about the project, to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute through accessible language and to use appropriate question formats. Openended questions invited the sharing of reflections on the connections between lives in the past and in the present, so enabling participants to contextualise memories while also ensuring that they were in control of the process.

The new phase of Your Tenement Memories, which began in June 2019 and which, based on the connections that are continuously being made, will proceed indefinitely, has two components. The first is to return to suburban locations to meet and connect with former tenement residents who were missed during Phase One. The second is to meet again with participants who have self-identified as willing to tell their stories in more detail. Over time, these stories will be developed as exhibitions and through guided tours at 14 Henrietta Street.

Audience-Centred Thinking is at the heart of everything that the Company does at 14 Henrietta Street, and is being delivered through several activities in addition to the Your Tenement Memories programme. These include, for example, reminiscence sessions with groups who cannot

Your Tenement Memories oral history event at 14 Henrietta Street.

Credit: : Dan Butler

easily access the Museum, such as in day-care centres. To these, the team brings everyday items connecting with Dublin tenement life – for example, carbolic soap, Rinso and marbles. These have led to an idea for a ‘mobile museum’ service that will be further developed during 2020.

Conclusion

Using the Your Tenement Memories programme as a case study, this article has shown how Audience-Centred Thinking can be practically applied. It has demonstrated that the approach can be used to outwardly reflect, and to drive, the development of an organisation’s democratic values, leading to deeper and more meaningful community engagement. Founded on the method of offering an open invitation to participate within supportive environments that are ‘owned’ by communities, Your Tenement Memories has enabled the development of relationships that will remain central to Dublin City Council Culture Company activity. Effective in ‘crowd-sourcing’ historical evidence that is generating museum content, it has also invested power in participants, providing them with the means to activate the stories that they want to see told.

Aalia Kamal is Head of Engagement and Gemma Sexton is Head of Visitor Experience at the Dublin City Council Culture Company.

MUSEUM IRELAND 2019

Supported Studios: Crawford Artists in Context

Emma Klemencic, Karolina Poplawska, Louise Foott & Anne Boddaert

Introduction

This article explores the concept of the Supported Studio and examines the history of such studios in Cork. It sets out the extraordinary contribution of Hermann Marbe, an artist facilitator who pioneered provision in the city. With particular focus on the Crawford Supported Studio, the article communicates some of the achievements of studio artists who have exhibited their work across Cork and in Dublin, delivering mainstream learning programmes and working alongside European and global partners. Finally, it gives mention to future work to be delivered by the Crawford Supported Studio.

Supported Studios in Ireland

Supported studios are sustained, creative environments that foster and support the art practice of individuals with health or social needs. They enable marginalized individuals to develop their professional practice, providing technical artistic support, promoting artists in the marketplace and building audiences outside health and social care settings. Irish supported studios are a precious ecosystem, without which many artists would be deprived of the means to make their work. Supported studios in Ireland, including KCAT in Kilkenny and the Arts Ability Studio group in Wexford, enable people with intellectual disabilities to have a meaningful creative presence within the cultural life of their communities. Padraig Naughton, Director of Arts & Disability Ireland, has described in conversation with us advances in supported studio practice as “long fought” and “hard-won” by small groups of dedicated arts workers.

Glasheen Art Studio Programme (GASP)

At the John Birmingham Day Care Centre in Cork, since the early 2000s artist facilitator Hermann Marbe had created a supported studio, the Glasheen Art Studio Programme (GASP). Here, he introduced art techniques and provided a space where people could try them out and identify the media that best brought out their talent. Every morning Hermann would visit each room, inviting its occupants to make some art. The studio door was open to all and residents could come as often as they wished. He patiently encouraged people to build their skills and confidence, discovering their unique creative natures over time.

Hermann met many unique artists among the residents of the day care centre. Ken Daly, a very quiet man, liked to draw portraits from magazines or photo albums. He captured the look of a person in a very caricatured way, adding humour that nobody had ever suspected from him. Siobhan Mullane would be working on a painting, and, if distracted, could not finish the piece that day. She would return the following week and, barely looking at her painting, would mix exactly the same shade of paint and continue to work as if she had never stopped. These are just two of the many talented artists whom Hermann met and supported, but they provide rich examples of how

Portrait of Hermann Marbe reworked by Marie Sexton. From the collection of Hermann Marbe.

art reduced the impact of individuals’ physical and psychological conditions on their engagement with the outside world.

Hermann rejected the dominance of disability as a theme in people’s lives, blending away the “special needs” aspect of his work. He believed that we all have special needs and need help in different forms: he was more interested in people’s strengths. Hermann strove to help people to become stronger within their community, shifting their status from day-care residents to self-sufficient artists. He recognized that to do so, people had to come out of the big day-care “bay” rooms in which they sat, to work in the heart of the city alongside other artists, meeting visitors and participating as equals.

By building GASP’s relationships with other organisations, Hermann Marbe impacted visual arts practice across the city as a whole. In the Mayfield Arts Centre, GASP members developed their professional skills and gained accredited arts training. With Meitheal Mara, a community boatyard and training centre, they built and launched a boat, the Friend-Ship, later exhibited in Cork Public Museum and at Cork Educate Together national school. CIT Crawford College of Art and Design provided studio space in the city centre where artists could explore new work, meet and work alongside students, participate in projects and teach classes. Crawford Art Gallery invited two to work as artists in residence, during which time they contributed to the Gallery’s Learn & Explore programme by designing and delivering engagement activities, including for Culture Night.

Over time, GASP artists became increasingly visible, undertaking projects with schools, in restaurants, cafés, a nursing home, in Irish Examiner and Evening Echo premises and in other local offices. They used the Bank of Ireland’s Workbench exhibition space, established a studio on the Cork-Dublin train, occupied an empty retail unit and exhibited in numerous cafés in Cork and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

The Crawford Supported Studio

In May 2018, Hermann Marbe passed away. With this, the GASP artists lost a formidable mentor and their greatest friend, but Hermann had seeded love for his project in many people’s hearts. His death coincided with the removal of funding from Cúig (Creativity Unlimited Integrated Group), founded ten years previously by the Mayfield Arts Centre, a vibrant art-facilitating and training centre that is deeply involved in its community. The idea for Crawford Support Studio was born.

The Crawford Supported Studio, established in 2018, is delivered through a partnership of institutional allies, comprising Crawford Art Gallery, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork City Council’s Arts Office and COPE Foundation. It is itself a legacy project, aiming to carefully hold over ten years’ worth of supported studio practice and sustaining that initiated, nurtured and developed within COPE Foundation by Hermann Marbe.

The Studio’s ethos is embedded in that of Marbe, and centres on recognising and valuing difference and enabling marginalized artists to shape their own cultural identities. Two dedicated facilitators, Karolina Poplawska and Mairead O’Callaghan

facilitate studio spaces, providing one day a week in each of the Gallery and the College of Art. Set up to provide a space for the GASP and Cúig artists to maintain their art practice, the Studio also continues to build links with organizations, artists, schools, students, community groups and fellow supported studios.

In 2019, the Crawford Art Gallery remains mindful of Hermann Marbe’s insistence that public institutions must enable people to identify as artists rather than as disabled. Through its unique anchoring within both gallery and art college, the Crawford Supported Studio partnership has sought to rise to this challenge by supporting successful applications for Arts and Disability Ireland grants. Through a Mentoring Grant, artist Tom O’Sullivan will work with painter Tom Climent and studio-facilitator Mairead O’Callaghan to explore technique, paint on a larger scale and work more independently. Yvonne Condon’s New Work Grant will be a site-specific project in rural and urban settings identified as suitable and permissible in partnership with Cork City Council. Through a Connect Award, Íde Ni Shúilleabháin, Ailbhe Barrett, Bríd Heffernan and John Keating will develop new processes with Cork Printmakers. Supported and sustained by means of collaboration with a number of varied groups, the Crawford Supported Studio is broadening recognition of the importance of difference.

Exhibitions, Programmes and Partnerships

Crawford Supported Studio exhibitions build on the now long-established presence within the Crawford Art Gallery of GASP and Cúig artists. In 2013 their work was exhibited in Outside In: The Art of Inclusion, a unique, collaborative project at three Cork venues – Crawford Art Gallery, City Hall and the CIT Wandersford Quay Gallery. The outcome of a partnership between Crawford Art Gallery, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design, Mayfield Arts Centre/Newbury House and Cork City Council, the exhibition showcased selected works of over fifty artists, working in supported studio settings, in Cork, Kilkenny, Youghal, Brighton, Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco. With a publication edited by Louise Foott, the exhibition was accompanied by discussions and workshops with participating artists, continuing through the